Folk Illusions

Claiborne Rice, K. Brandon Barker

Description

Wiggling a pencil so that it looks like it is made of rubber, "stealing" your niece's nose, and listening for the sounds of the ocean in a conch shell– these are examples of folk illusions, youthful play forms that trade on perceptual oddities. In this groundbreaking study, K. Brandon Barker and Claiborne Rice argue that these easily overlooked instances of children's folklore offer an important avenue for studying perception and cognition in the contexts of social and embodied development. Folk illusions are traditionalized verbal and/or physical actions that are performed with the intention of creating a phantasm for one or more participants. Using a cross-disciplinary approach that combines the ethnographic methods of folklore with the empirical data of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology, Barker and Rice catalogue over eighty discrete folk illusions while exploring the complexities of embodied perception. Taken together as a genre of folklore, folk illusions show that people, starting from a young age, possess an awareness of the illusory tendencies of perceptual processes as well as an awareness that the distinctions between illusion and reality are always communally formed.

Preface: Zane's Illusion

Acknowledgements

Accessing Audiovisual Materials

1. Everyone Knows that Seeing is (not always) Believing

2. Four Forms of Folk Illusions

3. Folk Illusions and the Social Activation of Embodiment

4. Folk Illusions and Active Perception

5. Folk Illusions and the Weight of the World

6. Folk Illusions and the Face in the Mirror or The Boundaries of a Genre

7. Folk Illusions, Development, and Body Acquisition

Appendix: Catalog of Folk Illusions

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Children's Studies
• Developmental
• Life Sciences
• Optical Illusions
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Folclore
• Childhood studies
• Biology
• Ethnography
• Human development (biology)
• Optical illusion
• Neuroscience
• Mythology
• Child
• 454 Life Sciences
• Folklore
• Neurosciences

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 avril 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253041128
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

FOLK ILLUSIONS
FOLK ILLUSIONS
Children, Folklore, and Sciences of Perception
K. Brandon Barker and Claiborne Rice
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Brandon Barker and Clai Rice
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04108-1 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04109-8 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04110-4 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19
To our families
CONTENTS

Preface: Zane s Illusion

Acknowledgments

Accessing Audiovisual Materials

1 Everyone Knows That Seeing Is ( Not Always ) Believing

2 Four Forms of Folk Illusions

3 Folk Illusions and the Social Activation of Embodiment

4 Folk Illusions and Active Perception

5 Folk Illusions and the Weight of the World

6 Folk Illusions and the Face in the Mirror

7 Folk Illusions and Body Acquisition

Appendix: Catalog of Folk Illusions

Bibliography

Index of Subjects

Index of Names

Index of Folk Illusions
PREFACE
Zane s Illusion
G O LIKE THIS .
Hold your right hand out in front of you so that your arm extends perpendicularly from the center of your chest. Your right palm should be facing up so that you can see the underside of your right forearm. Now, make a fist with your right hand. The next step is simple. Pull your arm up in front of your face so that the distal portion of your forearm touches your nose and the knuckles of your fist point toward the sky. From this position (you can do this while you read), point the index finger on your left hand in the standard pointing position . Now, hold that pointed finger so that it is parallel to the ground and pointing to your right. Here comes the fun part. While staring straight ahead, slowly pass your pointed finger in front of your right forearm that is in front of your face.
Zane s mother, Rose, first relayed Zane s narrative description of the trick s origins in the spring of 2017. That semester, Rose was enrolled in Brandon Barker s Children s Folklore course at Indiana University. She developed a habit of showing Zane, her nine-year-old son, some of the games, rhymes, and other activities that she learned about in class. Then one evening over dinner, Zane showed his mother the shrinking/disappearing-finger illusion we described above. What an excellent trick! Correctly, Rose recognized that we would be interested to learn about the trick, so she asked Zane where he had learned it. His story, Rose told us, went something like this: Zane-while sitting in school one day-was bored and discouraged. Being strapped to a school desk can be torturous for children who value playful, fully embodied experience over pencils and paper. In this state of mind, Zane sort of found himself in the position that facilitates Zane s illusion as he, in frustration, rested his forehead in his palm. From there, Zane told his mother, he simply fiddled with his fingers until he discovered the visual illusion.
It is an appealing tale-both a testament to a bored nine-year-old s ingenuity and a reminder that children do not need extravagant toys or electronic charms in order to entertain themselves. But as we said, the story is more complicated than just this. In a fortuitous schedule overlap, Zane had a free day to visit our Children s Folklore course the following Monday because his school was closed for the observance of Presidents Day. On that Monday, we were discussing Yo-Mama joke cycles and toast-like battling traditions among children and teens. Much of youthful folklore, and thus much of a course on children s folklore, pushes the boundaries of acceptability. Children possess a keen knack for walking all over taboos. As a true consultant, Zane was prompted to share with us a Yo-Mama joke. After a sly, careful glance at his mother, he delighted the room: Yo mama is so ugly, she tried to enter an Ugly Contest, and the judges said, Sorry-no professionals! Rose s fellow students burst into cacophonous laughter. We had all just broken the rules by allowing her nine-year-old to perform for us what a child is supposed to perform only for his peers. It was a great pleasure and, clearly, Zane was a star.

Fig. 0.1. Zane performs Zane s illusion at his kitchen table.
Feeding off of this success, Brandon explained to Zane that the class was also very happy to have learned about Zane s illusion and that they had all been impressed with the trick. Sensing the moment was right, Rose then asked Zane to re-create his tale of discovering Zane s illusion:
Mom, I don t know what you re talking about. Zane blinked up at his mother.
Remember, at the dinner table, you told me about how you were frustrated at school, and how . . . Tilting her head, Rose tried to jog Zane s memory.
Blink . . . Blink . . . I never said that, Mom. I don t know what you re talking about.
Rose, surprised and a little embarrassed, laughed at Zane s apparent amnesia. As the conversation moved on, the rest of us chalked Zane s memory lapse up to the precarious mind of children. Brandon consoled her: They ll do that to you.
It turns out, Zane s illusion is only one of the many forms of children s play that distort the boundaries between illusion and reality. In the pages and chapters that follow, we will outline our understanding of these kinds of play by examining many such forms, and we will argue that these forms make up a discrete genre of folklore. In chapters 1 and 2 , we outline the central terms of our work and the pervasive components of these forms. Chapters 3 and 4 consider the active processes of transmission and embodied perception as mutually constitutive. Chapter 5 presents a case study of children s play with weight illusions, and chapter 6 problematizes the boundaries of our genre in the context of a well-known form of children s supernatural folklore: mirror summonings. Our concluding chapter outlines our notion of body acquisition, after which we provide an appendix of all the illusions that children, youths, and young adults have taught us. (Zane s illusion is B14.)
The appendix-though it is situated at the end of the book-is a good place to start. More than once, we will recommend taking a look at it before completing the chapters that precede it. And we do so now if for no other reason than to remind you that you too once performed Zane s illusion-like activities. If you are thinking that maybe you have never performed a trick like Zane s illusion, let us start by cautioning you: What is true of perception is true for memory. Assumptions carry great risks .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
W E ARE INDEBTED TO MANY PEOPLE FOR VARIOUS kinds of contributions to this book. First and foremost, we are thankful to the children and youths who have taught us how to play with illusions. We thank the teachers and administrators at St. Cecilia Middle School in Broussard, Louisiana, and at Parents Day Out Preschool in Bloomington, Indiana, for allowing us to break up the routines of their days. Similarly, we thank the Evangeline Area Council, Boy Scouts of America, for their willingness to speak about the illusions their young Scouts perform. We thank Cheryl Hesse for hosting our very first opportunity to observe kids performing folk illusions at her beautiful and hospitable home in Lafayette, Louisiana. We are grateful to several youthful star performers: Aoife, Lucas, Monica, Sofia, Jacob, Calvin, Finley, Zane, Addy, and Lilly. And to the students at Indiana University and the University of Louisiana who have helped us fill out our catalog, we say thank you.
We have benefited from the rich intellectual support of the Department of English at the University of Louisiana and the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. In Louisiana, we thank, especially, our friends and colleagues John Laudun, Barry Ancelet, Marcia Gaudet, Shelly Ingram, Skip Fox, Jonathan Goodwin, Mark Honegger, Wilbur Bennett, Yung-Hsing Wu, Jerry McGuire, Marthe Reed, Elizabeth Bobo, Carmen Comeaux, Keith Dorwick, and many others whose feedback and reinforcement have been invaluable. In Indiana, we developed enriching relationships with Diane Goldstein, Pravina Shukla, Gregory Schrempp, John McDowell, Jason Jackson, Ray Cashman, David McDonald, Tim Lloyd, Sue Thuoy, Fernando Orejuela, Daniel Reed, Alan Burdette, Ruth Stone, Rebecca Dirksen, and Alisha Jones. Talking for hours and hours with our friend Daniel Povinelli has sharpened both our thinking and our work with folk illusions. The same is true for our friend Henry Glassie, who, over many cups of coffee, has guided and encouraged this project, and we thank him for reading an early draft.
Outside of Louisiana and Indiana, we received tremendous aid from researchers in folklore and various other fields as we tried to avoid oversimplifying the important contributions that other disciplines have made to the study of folk illusions. We thank, especially, Elizabeth Tucker, Katharine Young, Susana Martinez-Conde, Stephen Macknik, Jack De Havas, Giovanni Caputo, Mike Kalish, Fabrizio